You are inhabited by dead aliens!

Continuing my streak of posts dealing with religion, I learned something new about Scientology today. I thought it was pretty much just a silly self actualization-type cult claiming to be based in science. Stupid, but not that interesting. Apparently, I was wrong. Skeptico quotes this summary:

the alien galactic ruler Xenu who was in charge of Earth and 75 other planets in this part of the galaxy some 75 million years ago and how he cured overpopulation by paralysing the people of the other planets, flying them to Earth in DC-8 space planes, arranging them round a volcano to murder them with H bombs. Not done with that these souls of these murdered people were gathered up and boxed, taken to cinemas and shown films for several days. The end result being that the souls clustered together and now inhabit people in their thousands. And of course they must be removed at huge expense.

That’s apparently from a Scientologist leaflet, based on L. Ron Hubbard’s OT III document. The page of OT III (which is very closely guarded by the Scientology folk) that site has is bizarre.

My favourite Scientology/Dianetics bit involves the reason why volcanoes are such prominent symbols for them. Apparently Xenu solved the overpopulation problem in his galactic alliance by strapping them to a volcano and dropping H-bombs on them. Then Xenu decided to show movies to the souls and that’s why people now have issues that require an immediate personality test.

The question remains … why a volcano? Were the H-bombs and bad home movies not enough?